is the work of the Holy Spirit, the consuming fire of Divine Love. This
1. First comes that loving contemplation of the 'uplifted heart' which is the work of the Holy Spirit, the consuming fire of Divine Love. This ardent love, invading the self, and satisfying it in that intimate experience of personal communion so often described in the writings of the mystics, represents the self's first call to contemplation and first natural response; made with "so great a joy and delight of soul and body, in his uplifted heart, that the man knoweth not what hath befallen him, nor how he may endure it." For Ruysbroeck this purely emotional reaction to Reality, this burning flame of devotion - which seemed to Richard Rolle the essence of the contemplative life - is but its initial phase. It corresponds with - and indeed generally accompanies - those feverheats, those 'tempests' of impatient love endured by the soul at the height of the Illuminative Way. Love, it is true, shall be from first to last the inspiring force of the contemplative's ascents: his education is from one point of view simply an education in love. But this love is a passion of many degrees; and the 'urgency felt in the heart,' the restlessness and hunger of this spiritual feeling-state, is only its lowest form. The love which burns like white fire on the apex of the soul, longs for sacrifice, inspires heroic action, and goes forward without fear, 'holy, strong and free,' to brave the terrors of the Divine Dark, is of another temper than this joyful sentiment. 2. A loving stretching out into God, and an intellectual gazing upon Him, says Ruysbroeck, in a passage which I have already quoted, are the 'two heavenly pipes' in which the wind of the Spirit sings. So the next phase in the contemplative's development is that enhancement of the intellect, the power of perceiving, as against desiring and loving Reality, which is the work of the Logos, the Divine Wisdom. As the cleansed and detached heart had been lifted up to feel the Transcendent; now the understanding, stripped of sense-images, purged of intellectual arrogance, clarified by grace, is lifted up to apprehend it. This degree has two phases. First, that enlargement of the understanding to an increased comprehension of truth, the finding of deeper and diviner meanings in things already known, which Richard of St. Victor called mentis dilatatio. Next, that further uplift of the mind to a state in which it is able to contemplate things above